An incisive biography of the prolific photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith
Sam Stephenson is a writer and documentarian born in Washington, North Carolina. He is the author of Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project and The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965, as well as many pieces for publications such as The New York Times, The Paris Review, Tin House, and the Oxford American. He is a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a two-time Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award winner, and the 2012-2013 Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, where in 2013 he founded Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature & Materials.
"Fascinating . . . evocative . . . For all that, the wayward
individual that emerges out of Stephenson's ambitious "wide angle"
approach remains essentially unknowable, a blur in an otherwise
sharply defined portrait of a tougher time and a truly bohemian
milieu that already seems impossibly distant." --Sean O'Hagan, The
Guardian "We would understand . . . little of Gene Smith's legacy
were it not for Stephenson's labors." --Vince Passaro, Harper's
"Stephenson has created a fantastic, experimental form for a
revealing biographical sketch, taken from voices rarely heard . . .
A great read." --Anthony Bannon, Buffalo News "[A] far-reaching,
insightful biography . . . Stephenson balances the history and the
drama of Smith's life in a skillful distillation of his expansive,
careful research." --Publishers Weekly "Compelling . . . Gene
Smith's Sink is a haunting exploration of the photographic mind."
--Shelf Awareness "Sam Stephenson's earlier books on W. Eugene
Smith's Pittsburgh and Jazz Loft projects have established him as
the leading authority on defining parts of the photographer's
career. Now, in this gripping biography, Stephenson has extended
his research to the whole of Smith's turbulent life, adding greatly
to our knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of his
extraordinary work." --Geoff Dyer, author of The Ongoing Moment
Among the things I love about Sam Stephenson's book Gene Smith's
Sink is that it's the result of, and an artifact of, lyric
research: research that ostensibly originates with a given subject
or archive, but very quickly follows leads elsewhere. It's a sort
of wandering and associative research, and in this way has as much
to do with poetry as it does "documentary" or "nonfiction." Lyric
research reminds us that the researcher, the writer, the speaker,
is also the subject. But maybe more to the point when speaking
about Stephenson's beautiful book, lyric research is a capacious
mode of seeing, which seems appropriate, given the book's occasion
is the photographer Gene Smith. Given the book's subject,
ultimately, is looking. --Ross Gay, 2015 National Book Critics
Circle Award winner in poetry "Sam Stephenson's brave and wise
book, both more and less than a biography, is a spare demonstration
of a huge idea: that nothing is ever finished and nobody is really
knowable. And so the roundabout way to know a difficult and
extraordinary creator like W. Eugene Smith, or really anyone, may
be the most effective and authentic way." --Ben Ratliff, author of
Every Song Ever "Sound is more present in Gene Smith's Sink than in
any book I've ever read. In this deeply empathic book, the reader
leans forward, listening, so that when the call of the
chuck-will's-widow occurs on Sixth Avenue, it can be heard. This
stunning book resembles a Tennessee Williams play that obsessed
Smith; it is the Camino Real of biographies." --Margaret Bradham
Thornton, editor of Tennessee Williams's Notebooks "The elisions
are bold and the detours central. Steadfastly refusing to either
lionize or vilify W. Eugene Smith, Sam Stephenson achieves
something of a different, more subtle order. What might have been a
book about one man's life is instead about many lives--human
constellations no less interesting than the famous photographer's
(very) dark star. Stephenson's twenty-year sojourn into Smith's
unique, desperately
obsessive leavings births a remarkable, deeply generous book."
--Jem Cohen, director of Museum Hours "Gene Smith's Sink is the
story of a well-known photographer. It tells a lot about his
working life and it tells a lot about his personal life. But what
it tells best are things much more complicated. There are many
revelations by which I saw a glimpse of what it is like to be a
real photographer." --Hiroshi Watanabe, photographer
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